Language is more than just a
means of communication. It influences our culture and even our thought processes. During the first four decades of the 20th century, language was viewed
by American linguists and anthropologists as being more important than it actually is in
shaping our
perception of reality. This was mostly due to Edward Sapir and
his student Benjamin Whorf who
said that language predetermines what we see in the world around us. In other words,
language acts like a polarizing lens on a camera in filtering reality--we see the real
world only in the categories of our language.

Cross cultural comparisons of such things as
color terms were used by Sapir and Whorf as evidence of
this hypothesis. When we perceive color with
our eyes, we are sensing that portion of
electromagnetic
radiation that is visible light. In fact, the spectrum of visible light is a
continuum of light waves with frequencies that increase at a continuous rate from one end
to the other. In other words, there are no distinct colors like red and green in
nature. Our culture, through language, guides us in seeing the spectrum in terms of
the arbitrarily established categories that we call colors. Different cultures may
divide up the spectrum in different ways. This can be seen in the comparison of some
English language colors with their counterparts in the Tiv language of Nigeria:

Note:value refers to the
lightness or darkness of a color. High value is light and low value is dark.

Sapir and
Whorf interpreted these data as indicating that colors are not objective, naturally
determined segments of reality. In other words, the colors we see
are predetermined
by what our culture prepares us to see. This example
used to support the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
was
objectively tested in the 1960's. That research indicated that they went too
far. All normal humans share similar sense perceptions of color despite differences
in color terminology from one language to another. The physiology of our eyes is
essentially the same. People all over the world can see subtle gradations of color
and can comprehend other ways of dividing up the spectrum of visible light. However,
as a society's economy and technology increase in complexity, the number of color terms
usually also increases. That is to say, the spectrum of visible light gets
subdivided into more categories. As the environment changes, culture and language
typically respond by creating new terminology to describe it.

NOTE:In 1976 Paul Kay, a University of California, Berkeley
linguistics professor, led a team of researchers in collecting color terms
used by 110 different languages around the world. Reexamining these
data in 2006, Delwin Lindsey and Angela Brown of Ohio State University,
Columbus discovered that most languages in this study do not make a
distinction between green and blue. Further, the closer the homeland
of a language group is to the equator the less likely they are to
distinguish between green and blue. Lindsey suggests as a possible
explanation that people in intensely sunny environments, such as open
country near the equator, have had their ability to see color altered due to
the yellowing of the eye lens caused by excessive ultraviolet radiation.

It is now clear that the terminology used by a
culture primarily reflects that culture's interests and concerns. For instance,
Indians in Canada's Northwest Territories typically have at
least 13 terms for different types and conditions
of snow, while most non-skiing native Southern
Californians use only 2 terms--ice and snow. That
does not mean that the English language only has 2 terms. Quite the
contrary, there are many more English words that refer to different states of
frozen water, such as blizzard, dusting, flurry, frost,
hail, hardpack, powder, sleet, slush, and snowflake. The point is that
these terms are rarely if ever used by people living in tropical or
subtropical regions because they rarely encounter frozen water in any
form other than ice cubes. The distinctions between different snow
conditions are not relevant to
everyday life and children may not even have the words explained to them. However,
people in these warmer regions make fine distinctions about other phenomena
that are important to them. For instance, coastal Southern
Californians often have dozens of surfing related words that would likely be
unknown to most Indians in the
Northwest Territories or to people living in Britain for that matter.

The number of terms related to a
particular topic also may be greater or smaller depending on such social factors as gender. For example, North American women generally
make far more color distinctions than do men. This may be largely due to the fact
that subtle color differences are important factors in women's clothing and makeup.
Parents and peers usually encourage and train girls early to be knowledgeable about these
distinctions.

Test
your color term knowledge.
What color is the blouse?

Click the button to see
if you are correct.

The cultural environment that
people grow up in can have surprising effects
on how they interpret the world around them. This became apparent during
a Washington D.C. murder trial in 2002. A deaf man was convicted
of stabbing to death two of his classmates at Gallaudet University. At
his trial, the defendant said that he was told to do it by mysterious
black-gloved hands. His delusions did not come in the form of spoken
language. He was told to commit these brutal murders through sign
language--his mode of communication. Another example is provided by
Guugu Timithirr language speakers of the Cape York Peninsula in northeastern
Australia. This group of Aborigines do not have words for left, right,
front, or back. They use absolute rather than relative directions.
When they refer to people or objects in their environment, they use compass
directions. They would say "I am standing southwest of my sister" rather than "I am
standing to the left of my sister." Critics of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
would point out that the Aborigines who speak this language also usually learn
English and can use left, right, front, and back just as we do. However,
if they do not learn English during early childhood, they have difficulty in
orienting themselves relatively and absolute orientation makes much more sense
to them.

Ethnoscience

Anthropologists have found
that learning about how people categorize things in their environment provides important
insights into the interests, concerns, and values of their culture.
Field workers
involved in this type of research refer to it as ethnoscience.
These ethnoscientists have made a
useful distinction in regards to ways of describing categories of reality. Visitors
to another society can bring their own culture's categories and interpret everything in
those terms. However, there will be little understanding of the minds of the people
in the society being visited. In contrast, the
visitors can suspend their own culture's
perspective and learn the categories of reality in the new society. By doing this,
they gain a much more profound understanding of the other culture. Ethnoscientists
define these two different approaches as being etic
and
emic .
Etic categories
involve a classification according to some external system of analysis brought in by the
visitor. This is the approach of biology in using the Linnaean classification
system to define new species. It assumes that ultimately, there is an objective
reality and that is more important than cultural perceptions of it. In contrast,
emic
categories involve a classification according to the way in which members of a society
classify their own world. It may tell us little about the objective reality but it
is very insightful in understanding how other people perceive that reality through the
filter of their language and culture.